


you make a fool of death

by figure8



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Hades and Persephone Mythology Fusion, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Colonialism, M/M, Magical Realism, Trope Inversion, except not really, like this is set during the japanese occupation of korea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 07:26:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17075957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/figure8/pseuds/figure8
Summary: “A debt,” Jongdae’s older brother had explained, weaving flowers into Jongdae’s long honey-colored braid. “We owe the Oh clan a debt.”





	you make a fool of death

**Author's Note:**

> **prompt leaf:** #54  
>  **author’s note** :  
> dear prompter, i suspect this story is a far cry from what you expected. i’m not exactly sorry about it, because it allowed me to explore dynamics and narratives in a way i hadn’t before, and in a way that i hope will be interesting to read, too; but i do apologize for how i took your idea and uh, ran with it. very far ldjgjg  
> because of the supernatural nature of my narrator, some aspects of this story are purposefully left vague. i do hope however that the general concept is easy to follow. hades/persephone aus/metaphors are always a joy to read, personally, and i’m so glad i got to write my own with this. i’ll gladly talk more about it in the comments once authors are revealed, but i’ve mixed and matched multiple myths in here, and while it was *hard*, it was also very rewarding. this is, uh, probably the most meta thing i’ll ever write in my life.  
> sehun’s character is vaguely inspired by uisong, a real historical figure. this fic is rooted in colonialism as a theme, but once again, because our narrator is a *god*, i don’t think it explores it in an “involved” enough way to warrant a trigger warning, if that makes sense. 
> 
> mod snowy owl, you are an ACTUAL ANGEL. thank you for putting up with me and my chaotic writing process. an even bigger thank you for organizing all this.
> 
> titled after hunger by florence+the machine, but the real anthem of this fic is actually cosmic love.  
> enjoy <3

The grass is warm against Jongdae’s palms when he kneels on the ground, runs his hands through it. Above him, the sun smiles. _Welcome home,_ the breeze murmurs, gentle on his skin, a phantom caress on his cheek. _Welcome home, child._

 

//

 

“A debt,” Jongdae’s older brother had explained, weaving flowers into Jongdae’s long honey-colored braid. “We owe the Oh clan a debt.”

Minseok’s voice had had an unfamiliar tint to it that morning, an uneasy vibrato. Jongdae remembers reaching for him, turning around, soothing the worried lines on his forehead with two fingers.

Now, standing in front of Oh Sehun’s mansion, Jongdae understands. The air here is stale, leaving the faintest acrid aftertaste on Jongdae’s tongue as he swallows dryly. Back home, in the meadows, oxygen is almost sweet.

Back home, the earth breathes when Jongdae does.

 

//

 

It is an old story, a forgotten story. A tale twisted and transformed, changed as many times as it has been recounted. Nothing remains unaltered, Jongdae knows. Not even legends.

It is an old story, a forgotten story, a story one can trace as far back as the time of kings, Minseok says. Jongdae rolls his eyes. On his right, wrapped in a soft blanket, Yixing stares at Minseok expectantly. Yixing stares at Minseok a lot, lately. For guidance. For _permission,_ Jongdae thinks, too.

It used to be the six of them, once upon a time. Minseok and Jongdae, bound by blood. Minseok and Lu Han, bound by vows. Where Lu Han went, Yifan and Zitao and Yixing followed. It used to be the six of them, until it wasn’t. Yixing is still here, but sometimes Jongdae wonders. If he feels the pull, like the others. If they’ll wake up one day to find him gone.

It’s an old story, Minseok says again, but it is a true story. In Goryeo, their kind was revered, but it was also feared. Humans are fickle-minded. God today, the Devil tomorrow. One day worshipped, the next burned at the stake—this has always been their fate.

“What does that have to do with Oh Sehun?” Jongdae asks, impatient.

Yixing glares at him. He’s hungry for words, hungry for narratives. This is how they anchor themselves into this world. “Let hyung finish.”

There was a warrior, Minseok continues. A noble, maybe even a prince. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the debt, a promise than can never be broken. A life for a life. Oh Sehun’s ancestor saved an _apsara_ once, and now Minseok and Jongdae are bound to him. Every generation, the river offers a son to the Oh clan.

 

//

 

Oh Sehun is tall, and gruff, and perpetually scowling.

“I don’t need a sorcerer,” he tells Jongdae, disdainful.

“Good,” Jongdae smiles, “Because I don’t do magic.”

Oh Sehun seems taken aback by that.

“My father,” he says, and then he stops, eats back the rest of his sentence. “My father,” he says again after a beat of silence, “Said you had powers, and that you would do what I say.”

Jongdae feels it burning then, the simmering anger. Jongdae might be bound by oath, but he cannot be _controlled._ “I am not a dog.”

“You are not a sorcerer,” Oh Sehun says, “And you are not a dog. That’s a lot of negations, Kim Jongdae. What _are_ you, then?”

 _Much more powerful than you,_ Jongdae wants to retort, but it’s only half a truth. He ponders on the best way to answer the question.

He settles for, “Your people have many names for mine.” Oh Sehun observes him curiously, expecting. “Sprite. Nymph. Fae. Minor deity.” He accompanies that last one with a curl of his lips, furtive, mocking. Then, finally, like a secret: “ _Apsara._ ”

There was a time where men kept statuettes of his brothers and sisters in their temples. Now they look at him like Oh Sehun does right at this moment, disbelief barely concealed. It does something, to Jongdae. He can feel the warmth in him waver. Gods, after all, need believers to keep existing. “Your fairytales, Oh Sehun, aren’t they full of water spirits?”

“Those are stories for children,” Oh Sehun says. Jongdae looks at him, really looks at him. Doesn’t say, isn’t that what you are? A child? Sitting on this oversized throne, in these oversized clothes, taking on this oversized role; aren’t you just a child?

 

//

 

Well before Jongdae was born, Minseok had another brother. They do not utter his name.

 

//

 

Oh Sehun is young, barely twenty-four summers. His parents have left him an empire of death and gold, gone with a bang, gone in a splatter of blood. He navigates the world uneasily, strained, uncomfortable outside his realm of darkness, so very bad at being human. Jongdae was sent to be his shadow and his light, but Oh Sehun doesn’t spare him a glance as he cuts through the fabric of the world. Bodies in his wake, like morbid crumbs to follow; this is who Oh Sehun is. Prince of the underworld, merchant of sorrow; this is the man Jongdae has to serve. The flickering flame in him revolts at the mere thought.

 

//

 

Winter hits Seoul hard that year. Colder, harsher; icy winds entering bones like burning blades. Jongdae stares out the window of his big empty room and sighs, condensation forming on the glass. The tips of his fingers tingle, warm. The light inside him is dying to slip out, bubbling up anxiously close to the surface.

Outside, snow falls on the city like a large coat, covering it in white. Sehun hasn’t stopped complaining in weeks—closed roads are bad for business. He doesn’t know how to use Jongdae yet, doesn’t understand the exact extent of what Jongdae can do. Jongdae certainly isn’t going to volunteer himself freely.

“There was a man,” Sehun says, “Always with my father.” He watches Jongdae carefully, like he’s solving a puzzle. He hasn’t even taken his jacket off yet, snowflakes melting on the sheepskin, turning into droplets, sinuously sliding. There’s going to be a puddle on Jongdae’s floor soon.

“You’re dripping all over the carpet,” Jongdae says.

“It’s my house,” Sehun tells him, unmoved. “There was a man,” he repeats. “Was he like you? He never left his side.”

 _Yes,_ Jongdae doesn’t say. _Yes, yes, where is he, I want him back, we want him back, he belongs with us._

He knows how to appear disinterested. His voice rings flat when he answers, “Maybe.”

“Say he was,” Sehun presses, prods. “Say he was, what would he be doing, if he were here?”

“His duty,” Jongdae says.

“You always speak like a poetry book. I don’t have the time to solve riddles.”

Jongdae wants to snarl, to bite. Jongdae wants to go home. Sweetly, softly, he says, “Tell me what you wish for.”

 

//

 

Oh Sehun wishes for a passageway to Suwon. The last storm has littered the main road out of the city with trees and black ice, and his last convoy is already four days late. Jongdae cackles when the request is made.  Humans have no _ambition._ Sehun gives him a weird look.

 

Barefoot in the snow, white powder turning to liquid under his skin, Jongdae can still feel Sehun’s curious eyes on him. He presses his open hand to the ground, feels the pulse of the earth. Nothing remains unaltered, he knows. He calls the water to him, tells it to part, tells it to _mend._ He hears a gasp behind him when the dismembered trees start to levitate, branches and stems flying to each other, piecing themselves back together. His lips stretch into a feline smirk. _This is my playground, Oh Sehun,_ he thinks with no small amount of vicious satisfaction. _Look what you’ve invited into your home._

When the road is clear, a small enclave of spring in the middle of winter, Jongdae turns to the man who owns him.

Sehun is watching him cautiously, but he isn’t scared. The beginning of a frown has sketched itself on his face, and for a second it reminds Jongdae of his brother, and he feels the inexplicable need to touch the wrinkles away.

“Is this all you can do?” Sehun asks finally.

Jongdae hisses. The skies part, and thunder comes.

 

//

 

“Can you fly?” Sehun demands, like a kid with a new toy. Jongdae lifts himself off the ground. “What else can you do?” He closes his hand into a fist, then opens it like a lotus flower. A tiny blue flame is fluttering on his palm. Sehun’s eyes narrow. “I thought you said you didn’t do magic.”

Jongdae shakes his head. “This isn’t magic.”

“What is it, then?”

“Life itself. Elemental manipulation. Nothing remains unaltered, but only those who are one with Nature are given the power to alter her fundamentally.”

Sehun scoffs. “You’re playing with words again.”

“Maybe,” Jongdae smiles. The flame vanishes. “But I’m not a magician.”

“I looked it up,” Sehun says, chin angled upwards, defiant. “I found a book. _Apsaras_ are female spirits of the clouds and waters.”

“Humans,” Jongdae laughs. “You and your books.”

 

//

 

Jongdae was born in the river, of the river—once spume, then suddenly _alive._ Nothing remains unaltered.

Minseok had been waiting for him, on the shore. _Welcome home,_ a gentle kiss to his temple, a flower crown already plaited. _My brother, my brother, mine._

 

//

 

Electricity sparkles along Jongdae’s arms. He lets it crackle, until he is iridescent. He is Oh Sehun’s iron bar, a breathing intimidation tactic. In a world where people have forgotten how to pray, there is nothing scarier than a god.

 

//

 

In Seoul, in _death,_ Jongdae discovers life.

Sehun’s men play card games late at night, huddled close to the fireplace, their pistols forgotten. Their laughter is raucous, palms slapping thighs, bad teeth bared. These are sounds Jongdae doesn’t have anything to compare against—home, the river; to his ears it has always been bustling, but he understands here, that there is nothing loud about water flowing between rocks.

Sehun takes him to the market, where colors are bright and smells too heady. They are there to _collect,_ Jongdae’s catlike irises a threat more potent than firearms; but instead Jongdae looks, drinks in his surroundings, excitement barely contained. Sehun watches him watch, his lips stretched thin, the corners of his mouth fighting to lift into a smirk.

“Stop acting like a child,” he orders, but his tone doesn’t follow. Jongdae ignores him and gleefully steals a peach.

 

//

 

It is April, and the snow won’t stop falling. It is April, and the trees are barren, the sky refuses to stop crying. Jongdae rests his elbows on the windowsill, in his dark room on the third floor of this old building made out of stones, and looks outside, hungry for the sun.

He remembers a day eons ago, when youthful and stupid, he had ran too far from their small cottage, had hurt his knee and gotten lost. There had been an angry storm, for days, until Minseok had found him.

 

//

 

Human sustenance is a curiosity. Jongdae sits on the chair opposite Sehun across the dinner table, arms wrapped around his own legs, knees brought up to his chest. Soup and rice and fish, he knows them by smell, knows them by touch. He picks up a slice of eel, flicks his tongue to the surface inquisitively. Sehun’s eyes follow the movement, piercing.

“Tell me about your home,” he asks, later, as Jongdae takes a skeptical sip of soup.

And Jongdae does tell him, because he is lonely, and Sehun is lonely too. Tells him about existing on the fringes of this reality, about never quite belonging and belonging _too much_ at the same time, about wishing he could melt into the fabric of the world and just _be._

“You cannot travel to where I come from,” he says, and Sehun nods somberly, as if he understands. “Just like your world isn’t mine to linger in.”

In this room with high ceilings and bad lighting, as far removed from the sunny meadows where Jongdae was born as can be, he feels maybe as seen as he’ll ever be. To the man facing him, he is a tool—he is a weapon. Invoked in times of war, kept like a talisman, the way it was always _supposed_ to be.

 

//

 

They tame each other in the spaces between beats of silence. Fate is a violent, inescapable mistress—she shows no mercy to men, like she shows no mercy to gods. Oh Sehun watches foreign boots walk the land he calls his, and molds himself in opposition to their domination, everything about him tired defiance. The lives he takes, Jongdae comes to realize, are the lives of trespassers, or the lives of traitors. Just like his ancestor, Oh Sehun is a warrior, albeit one without armor.

History is cyclical, and Jongdae’s siblings have always been called upon by men and women struggling, fighting. Fighting hunger, fighting soldiers, fighting the specter of loneliness in the night.

 

//

 

The rumor mill is active, rolls fast. Strangers weave tales about them, the man and his god, the man and his demon. They call him Deathmaker, and Jongdae is his hand, Jongdae is his scythe—close to the border, where the story has traveled from mouth to ear to mouth to ear, distorted the way all good stories ought to be, Jongdae is his wife.

 

//

 

It is May, and the Han river is frozen.

 

//

 

It is June, and the birds still haven’t come.

 

//

 

On the first day of July, Yixing knocks on the door of the Oh Manor.

Behind him, the gardens are still covered in white. Above him, the skies are anthracite.

“I’m here for Jongdae,” he says very, very quietly. He’s dressed like a human, in a sharp navy-blue suit and a cream button-down, no tie. Jongdae comes down the stairs slowly, wearing nothing but a red plush bathrobe. When their eyes meet, he finds an absence in Yixing’s, the ghost of something. “You need to come home, Jongdae. Hyung is sick. You need to come home.”

 

//

 

Sehun is amused, at first.

“There is a god on my doorstep.”

“A healing spirit, yes,” Jongdae says, impatient. “I need you to let me go.”

He stops smiling at that. “No.”

“I need you to let me go,” Jongdae repeats. “My brother needs me.”

Sehun gets up. He’s clearly agitated, paces around the room. He looks like a child again, so impossibly young, so much still to learn. “That’s not how it works. You’re mine, you’re supposed to stay with me.”

“Yes,” Jongdae says softly. “That’s why I _need_ you to _let_ me go.”

“No,” Sehun says again, “You were _given_ to me, what am I going to—how will I, now—”

“The way you did before. Please.” Gods don’t plead, gods don’t beg. Men cry at the feet of _apsaras,_ not the opposite.

Jongdae sinks to his knees, takes Sehun’s hand, speaks his next words right against the inside of his wrist. “Free me, and I will come back. Let me tend to him. I will come back.”

Sehun doesn’t take his hand back. His eyes are wide open, staring.

“The books I read said you are tricksters, too.”

Jongdae inhales deeply. Bargains one of his few remaining secrets for his brother’s sake.

“Not you. I cannot trick _you._ We’re bound together by an ancestral pact. Everything I say to you is true.” _But I know how to twist words like knives,_ he does not say. _I know how to play you still._ “You lost your parents. You know of grief. Let me go.”

Sehun gives him seven days. Jongdae takes them.

 

//

 

 _Welcome home,_ the meadows sing. _Welcome home,_ the flowers sing. _Welcome home,_ Minseok mumbles into the crook of his neck, his body rigid and cold.

 

//

 

The skin under Minseok’s eyes is lined with faint purpling bruises. There is a pallor to his cheeks, a heaviness to his voice when he speaks. Jongdae sits at his bedside and presses cold compresses to his forehead and waits for the fever to break.

“I missed you,” Minseok says, small in many ways. “The house is empty without your voice.”

“You have Yixing,” Jongdae reminds him, indulgent.

“Yixing will leave me,” Minseok shakes his head. “Like the others, just like the others.”

Jongdae doesn’t contradict him, because he knows no one wants to be wrong when they’re in pain. But Lu Han didn’t leave. Lu Han never would have just _left,_ not when he tied himself to Minseok with a promise. The word of an _apsara_ cannot be broken.

But in sorrow there is no clear mind. Minseok turns his back to him, faces the wall. Jongdae puts his hand on his shoulder blade, palm splayed open, to feel the steady flow of his breath. When Minseok doesn’t react, it’s easy to just slide from his chair to the mattress, mold his front to Minseok’s back. Nose pressed to the soft short hair on Minseok’s nape, Jongdae exhales slowly, hot air in lieu of words.

 

//

 

The next morning, for the first time in months, the sun shines.

 

//

 

“You cut your hair,” Minseok remarks, face half hidden by the steam emanating from his mug of herbal tea.

“Humans don’t wear it long anymore,” Jongdae shrugs.

“I could still brush it,” Minseok says, “Adorn it with flowers.” Affection swells inside Jongdae’s ribcage like a typhoon.

“The people in the city,” Jongdae tells him later, as Minseok threads an ivory comb through his brown locks, “Don’t chant our names, don’t light up incense for us anymore. And the buildings, they are so tall, nothing like what you told me.”

Minseok looks away wistfully. He hasn’t left the cottage, their gardens, since his first brother went away. The world waits for no one, not even deities.

As color comes back to his brother’s face, and the snow starts melting, Jongdae wonders what the twisting in his gut might mean.

 

//

 

He comes back to the Oh Manor to find Sehun gearing up for war. The contrast of the scene unfolding in the large living room is striking: Sehun dressed like the Lord he is, the men that follow him in dirty army fatigues, their boots matted with mud. _Stains,_ Jongdae thinks, absently, _this will leave hellish stains on the carpet._ There is a large map unfolded on the table, and Sehun is pointing, circling spots in red. When he raises his head and sees Jongdae on the threshold, he drops his pen.

“You’re back.” Voice steady, but colored.

Jongdae smiles. “My word is sacred.” Seven pairs of eyes are trained on him. “Now, Oh Sehun,” he finally walks in, grabs a chair, “Tell me what you need from me.”

 

//

 

Between resistance and crime, the lines are blurred. Jongdae observes, and compares. Nothing remains unaltered, not even definitions.

Sehun sells weapons but he also uses them. He knows his merchandise like an artisan knows his craft; intimately, dutifully.

He reaps lives like one picks berries in the forest, and he keeps trophies. Jongdae finds him wearing nothing but a stolen Japanese greatcoat and linen pants, one evening, lounging on the leather couch in his father’s old office. The jacket is unbuttoned, revealing smooth fair skin and lean, hard muscle. Jongdae thinks, for a second, of the men Sehun has killed, with a snap of his fingers. Humans should not have that power, he decides.

Only gods. Only gods.

 

//

 

Hands on the ground, tree roots unearthing at his command, Jongdae serves a master he does not understand but has come to slowly admire. He rearranges nature into a trap, and then waits with Sehun and his men, hidden in the bushes. When the two cars come to a halt, the stirring he feels in his chest has no name. Sehun is beautiful in his black uniform, pistol in hand. He drags the old Japanese general by his collar out from the backseat of his shiny vehicle, and when the man falls to his knees, he calls him _Deathmaker,_ and begs for his life.

But Sehun is a man. Sehun does not grant wishes.

 

//

 

The first signs of it are subtle. The morning dew turns into snowflakes on green leaves, as clouds bite into the sun piece by piece. As August nears, the river turns to ice again.

“I think it might be my fault,” Jongdae tells Sehun as they both look at the white-covered road ahead of them. “And if you let me, I know how to make it stop.”

Sehun is smart, Sehun is a quick learner. “You want me to let you go again.”

“All the spring spirits are gone. One by one, erased by time and loss and oblivion. All this world has left is me, and my brother.” He grazes his fingers against the bark of the nearest tree, watches the ice melt from the mere contact. “But my brother is sick from lonesomeness. There is no warmth left in him, no fuel for the fire. It is hard, bringing in the fertile season when you are barren yourself.”

“I need you here,” Sehun says, urgent. “I’m nothing without your powers. Who will fear me? When I’m just a boy with guns, who will fear me?”

Jongdae smiles, fond, _fond._ “We are bound by oath, Oh Sehun. I will always return to you.”

 

//

 

And the grass is soft under Jongdae’s bare feet as he runs, and Minseok chases him. Everywhere they go the yellow weeds turns green, the birds wake up, the cicadas start singing. Jongdae runs and runs and runs, through countryside and city alike, and winter melts away, faster and faster to the soundtrack of Minseok’s laughter.

And in the evenings, when they sleep curled up against each other, all three of them, Jongdae’s fingers interlinked with Yixing’s, the heat of Minseok’s back against his, it tastes like summer, and it tastes like order, and it tastes like home.

 

//

 

But the heavy air of the mansion, the smell of dirt on the road, the colors of the market, the corner of Sehun’s mouth, the thrill of taking, the thrill of _humanness,_ the rapidity of living, all of this tastes like home, he thinks, too.

 

//

 

He remembers his first steps into the human world, the longing he had felt deep in his bones, the intoxicating need to turn around, to go back, to come back home where rules were simple, and sounds made sense.

The way his stomach tightens when he has too much time to think, the restlessness in his limbs, now, he does not know what to make of it; now that he _is_ home, now that the longing should have ceased.

He finds himself counting the days, with agitation, with _thirst._

 

//

 

On the twenty-first morning of September, Sehun waits for him at the door, expression disaffected. But his hand reaches out when Jongdae appears, even if he reins the instinctive movement in. Jongdae grins, eyes slanted.

“You kept your word,” Sehun says in lieu of greeting.

Jongdae pushes past him, into the house, _his house,_ joyfully. “I always do.”

 

//

 

And the months they spend together, Jongdae wonders if they have changed something within him, fundamentally. If maybe _some things_ can be altered by mortals the way they are by creatures like himself. If it is possible to be split in two, to want to turn into a tree—roots firmly on the ground here next to this man who doesn’t have anyone but him, leaves turned towards the sun, towards his brother.

And when it’s time to leave again, he knows. When Sehun’s gaze stays on him like he wishes his eyes were hands, he knows. _This is my kingdom, now, just as much as it is his._

 

//

 

“You spend your days at the window,” Minseok tells him, but there is no anger or jealousy in his voice.

“I like it there,” Jongdae admits. “I like it here, too.”

He’ll never be complete, the realization hitting harder with every departure. Child of two worlds, child of two seasons. Knowing death, existing among the ephemeral, it has given him a new comprehension of the mechanisms of his own purpose. There is a danger in eternal spring just like there is danger in eternal winter.

 

//

 

“It’s been more complicated, without you,” Sehun complains. If his tone is petulant, there is an edge to it, opening wider doors. Jongdae pounces on the occasion like a hunter. They’re in his room, his room that Sehun keeps decorating in small offerings—white furs, a jade statuette Jongdae saw him steal with his own hands, rich red velvet curtains.

“What did you miss, Sehun? What did you miss?”

“Your name carries fear, and it brings respect,” Sehun explains, “But nothing works better than people seeing what you can do. In this business, terror is currency.”

Jongdae shakes his head. “I do not lie to you. Do me the same courtesy. What did you _miss,_ Oh Sehun, while I was gone?”

Sehun gulps, his irises tumultuous. “You,” he breathes out eventually. “I missed you.”

Jongdae kisses him.

 

//

 

“I don’t—,” Sehun stumbles on his own words, shaken, uncertain, “I’m not—I don’t, not with men—”

Jongdae grins, wolfish, _hungry._ “I am no man, Oh Sehun.” Palm on Sehun’s chest, he pushes, gentle but firm, until the back of Sehun’s knees hit the edge of his bed. “I am a _god.”_

 

//

 

 _Humans are so fragile,_ Jongdae marvels as he kisses his way down Sehun’s torso, revelling in every slight tremble, drinking down every stutter and gasp. _Humans are so fragile,_ and yet, Sehun accepts him, welcomes him, calmly takes everything Jongdae has to give, and then more. Body undulating, head thrown back, beautiful and warm and intense, the very opposite of winter, the very opposite of death.

 

//

 

Jongdae loves the smell of roses, and the song of the river, and the way Sehun fits in his arms under the covers in the large bed of the master bedroom.

“Do sprites even take lovers?” Sehun asks, fingers playing absently with Jongdae’s hair. “I cannot be the first.”

Jongdae shifts, pushes himself up on his elbows, so they can look each other in the eye. “My brother had a companion. Love like that, it used to terrify me.”

“You’re speaking in past tense,” Sehun muses.

“That is because he’s gone. He and his brothers, they do not dwell in our realm anymore.”

Sehun frowns. “Do you mean they’re dead? How does one even kill a god?”

Jongdae bites his bottom lip, looks away. “By forgetting.”

 _Humans are so fragile,_ he thinks again, when Sehun’s frown deepens, as he tries to understand. Jongdae has been feeling much, much stronger lately, and he knows what he owes it to. The hundreds of people who say his name with the reverence reserved for legends, all because he was forced to serve this man, lend him his hands and his strength.

“My father’s _apsara,_ then?”

“My eldest brother,” Jongdae confirms softly. “Your parents must have been the last ones to _know._ When my last believer dies, I will disappear too.”

Sehun redresses himself, posture perfect, satin sheets pooling at his waist. “Tell me a secret no one else knows. Tell me something I can pass on to my children, something yours and yours alone, and they will pass it on to their children, and remember you. And you will never die.”

And if he had a heart, a real one, not this flesh he has molded in the image of men, Jongdae thinks it would be constricted by now, an invisible hand plunging inside his ribcage, through his lungs, to grab it and hold it tight tight _tight._

“My name is Chen,” he leans down to whisper in Sehun’s ear, “and my brother’s name is Xiumin, and my eldest brother’s name was Suho; and once upon a time, your ancestors chanted these names, and kept us alive, in exchange for our protection.”

 

//

 

And Sehun does chant his name; calls for him in the darkness later, voice hoarse and raw and dripping with honey, as Jongdae shows him how a god loves, head between his thighs, tongue of a trickster.

 

//

 

 _I took the stars from our eyes, and then I made a map_   
_And knew that somehow I could find my way back_   
_Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too_   
_So I stayed in the darkness with you_   


  
  



End file.
